Why India's Daughter is a non-starter

I watched Leslie Udwin's documentary "India's Daughter" for the third time. The last time when the heat and dust have settled and the humdrum gone. Still my views on the documentary haven't changed. The perverse mindset of the perpetrators of the heinous crime and those defending them is not India-specific but universal in nature.

I pondered over the issue for sometime now and tried some social experimentation in my day to day life. Despite the unsophisticated process of my social experimentation and the rudimentary nature of the outcome, the trend available demonstrated that whenever someone does something illegal and unethical, there is a broad tendency to defend it.

I am neither a psychiatrist nor a psychoanalyst or a criminologist and hence can't delve into the reasons behind such an action. At a superficial level though it seems that the defence mechanism sets in through which one justifies his actions both within oneself and outside, and this is a universal phenomenon.

So what Udwin showed in her film is universal and not specific to India and hence there is no justification to ban it in India. In fact, by banning it the Indian Government has provided the film with the much needed political succour to keep it afloat, not because of the content but by virtue of the political controversy. The controversy notwithstanding, the documentary has failed to reveal anything that was hitherto unknown to us.

My problem is mainly with Udwin's methodology. The way the perpetrators were given a platform to articulate their views and justify their actions, and that too unchallenged, defy all norms of effective and responsible journalism. My feeling is that Udwin being a veteran in documentary making was aware of this methodological lapse and hence allowed herself to be swayed by sensation and emotion, Recall how Udwin kept on stating in interviews that she herself was abused. However unfortunate it is, this in no way makes one any more competent  to direct a documentary on the said issue.

In the final analysis, Leslie Udwin's India's Daughter managed to create some surrealistic ripples but failed to take us even an inch further from where we were before.

The controversy surrounding the documentary on the gang rape of a paramedic in Delhi in December 2012, however, raises questions similar to the critique of the development model professed by the West in the post-war years. The assumption that the West is a moderniser and has an obligation to civilise humanity encouraged them to thrust upon development models and processes without trying to understand the essence of prosperity for individual nations in the global South. The homogeneity in western society and the inability of the policymakers and development practitioners to appreciate diversity are the biggest detriments for the one-size fits all prescription of the West.

It seems that the framework used by Leslie Udwin when conceptualising India's Daughter suffers from the same shortcomings.
  
Tirthankar Bandyopadhyay is a journalist and media consultant. 
He can be contacted at tirthankarb@hotmail.com 
All comments are personal.